highcut.orghatin’ on music you love since 2013

Metacritique, Explanations. What do I want here?

I make music. I love music.
It’s a mind altering, joy-bringing auditory structure, but it’s also nothing more!
It is not a tool for criticizing society (au contraire Adorno, who puts this ethical demand upon music).
It’s nothing metaphysical, beyond mind, body, world.

It’s a physical structure of waves, which our mind “understands” and turns into jest, mood, excitement etc. I don’t regard this opinion as an insult to music. It’s kind of a sober bummer, yes, but music still can be your life, your love or your religion. Don’t underestimate jest. Jest is life & music is a powerful jest-inducing drug.
As a producer my goal is to make music as jest-inducing as possible. I see it as a very complex game – a kind of psychological meta-chess, the real Glasperlenspiel. That’s why I am ready to use anything available for enhancing my gameplay: Psychology, history, musicology and of corse introspection – because how to find out if a track, a musical Gestalt or production technique is any good?
Just watch your reaction.

As you might guess by now, I am also against this artist-interview-“music comes only from my heart”-bullshit. If you want to make awesome music you have to know what chords, what harmonies, what timbres, what structures, or which figures sound good. Most of the producers don’t think about that stuff. They just want to “express themselves deep from their hearts”, metaphorically criticizing society at the same time. If you don’t pay attention to which musical figures bring joy, why and how one can find more such figures – bringing even more joy till heads explode and tears start running – you wind up making boring cliché-shit imitating others. Or you wind up making avantgarde-as-fuck shit, but nobody feels anything because you were so happy producing this crazy timbre on your modular, that you forgot to put in some delicious, gut melting harmonies and understandable structures.

I read a lot that that we are in this amazing time in history with all this awesome, crazy new music. I see this a bit differently. It’s very hard for me to find good new music. It seems the producers became lazy. They stuck in this technology-over-excited, metaphysical view of music where you just “make it from your guts, heart, intuition” – but you can’t make any progress like this. Heart – It’s what’s already in your head. It’s what you already heard. There will be no amazing “alien-to-heart” transfer. If you don’t reflect upon you musical bias, your musical decisions + if you aren’t critical as fuck to every second produced – you end up doing boring old farts.

On most music blogs you can read euphoric terms like “space beatz”, “oddball-wtf-alien-crazy-post-future- music” or “intelligent fractal hop” & when I listen to those soundcloud links all I hear is boring piece of old-fart-synthesizer-reverb-loaden-arpeggio-crap, really.

I criticized some artists on facebook just below the respective release and my comments were erased by Madlib, Oval (Markus Popp) and error-broadcast.
This page is my fight against this sad circumstances, against overhypes, against shallow, ever-friendly reviews which sound like advertisement, against lazy boring naive producers.

Here I will criticize music by producers who are (regarded as the best in the field of) making epic new avantgarde pop music. Most of the stuff I will bitch at I actually like or liked at some point. I will also write why I like something. I hope that there are underground awesome producers. You don’t need to be famous. Send me your music for review. It would be too boring for me to review real crap – so don’t send me real crap. It has to be of dem hookz. I also plan to release music on this page. It could be produced by me or others. If I manage to find/make something awesome.

So what do I want?
You see I am angry. I want to push producers, to push the scene, to stop the laziness, to make producers realize that music is a very complex-as-fuck phenomenon and that you have to work your ass off to produce a decent new, fresh-sounding, touching tune.